User talk:WhereIsMyMind
Spiffing Things Up Hey there! I was just wondering if you'd mind me spiffing up the design of this wikia a bit? Maybe we could do a new wordmark and something with the skin just to brighten things up a little. Also, I love that the main page has a lot of information on it, but maybe we could reorganize sections and revamp it a bit to look more streamlined while maintaining most of the content! I was also hoping to fix the main page up so that it's viewable on mobile devices because, if you try looking at it on a smartphone or tablet, the tables and other things are not displayed as beautifully as they are on desktop. Let me know what you think and if you're okay with me tinkering things. Would definitely love to get an opinion! Grace (profile)•(talk) 21:22, February 24, 2015 (UTC) :Hello, I hadn't heard from you or Seddiebade13 so I went ahead and made a spiff version on my sandbox here. As you can see, I just cleaned things up a bit by removing tables and extra code/videos in order to streamline the content and make it more mobile-friendly! I also made a new wordmark so it now says Dance Moms Wiki and has a transparent background. Ignoring the red links and missing quotes, I was hoping to make these changes to the wikia soon. Let me know what you think, thanks :) Grace (profile)•(talk) 23:23, March 3, 2015 (UTC) Hey, WhereIsMyMind! I went ahead with the change, but let me know what you think after you see it in place. I hope you like it! I can explain the choices I made if there is anything that looks odd to you, but the changes were made to make the site more accessible to people who wanted to visit Dance Moms Wiki on a mobile device or tablet. Again, let me know if you have any questions! Grace (profile)•(talk) 18:33, March 6, 2015 (UTC) Hi! Can you explain what do you want to see on videos pages. I am little bit confused. I thought you disable template because of slow loading pages. When I started to change it to galleries which loads faster, you returned this pages to templates which are disabled. Lovely Anya (talk) 18:02, March 11, 2015 (UTC) YouTube templates Heya! I'm working with Gcheung28 to try to get this site a li'l more mobile friendly, and one of the curiosities that we don't quite understand are the various YouTube templates. You seem to be the author of them, so I was wondering what you were hoping to achieve with them. Why are they better than simply using the normal video upload process and then calling them like left|350px? Also, I noticed on your user page that you seem to feel that this site is dead. Did you know that it's actually getting a ton of visitors? Maybe you're struggling to find editors, but you have huge audience. Please don't get discouraged: you're doing fantastic work here! — CzechOut 04:04, March 14, 2015 (UTC) ---- There are two or three issues with uploading videos like left|350px. The first is that "Lifetime"* has been very inconsistent about what they consider to be acceptable use of their material on YouTube (i.e., whether they react to such-and-such by simply making sure their claim gets the ad revenue from views; or instead make a more serious violation complaint)**; which YouTube channels they accept (and even encourage); and which channels they make serious complaints about for copyright. (Sometimes users delete videos or channels for non-copyright reasons, too. And then there are channels that Lifetime* accepts, but then the channel owner foolishly uploads a few videos with copyright belonging to some different party, then that other party complains, and so the entire channel gets deleted for that reason.) This has led to periods when many videos have gone dead. And you cannot tell if such a video is a dead-link in a simple manner, because the photo never, ever, ever refreshes... so the only way to check for dead videos is by manually trying to watch every video to see if each one still works. (If it's dead, clicking on that video will lead to a very disappointing user experience... they, or I, will expect to watch a video when clicking on the player-link, but instead see static, with some text saying that the video was removed for some reason. With a "YouTube template," I don't have to try to watch a video to know if it's functioning - or at least I don't when a video is embedded.) Checking manually for such dead-videos just takes too much time. Way, way, way too much time... especially with users who are extremely eager to upload every video they can find, put those videos on individual pages, while expanding the video library to a very large size. This is the first problem, and by far the most serious. A second smaller advantage to "YouTube templates" is that they permit playlists - for example, the two currently on the front page are playlists from Lifetime and an official site for the UK version of the show, and those lists automatically update when they update their YouTube channels. I think I've seen playlists work on Wikia for some other video sites besides YouTube. But at least I've never seen one working on Wikia for YT. A third minor issue is that I've seen some bugs. Views usually don't seem to be counted in the "view count" tally; but that's not really an important issue, and templates are actually worse here. More worrying is something that may be temporary, and I've only seen it more recently: some videos files seem to become corrupted into like a weird regular image file, when they are replaced using "Upload a new version of this file." It may be related to why there are sometimes blank squares when viewing in this manner. (You should see one blank rectangle-space in the lower right; but I've seen Wikis with more than one blank rectangle.) I haven't looked at weekly technical updates in awhile, so I don't if this is something that's been recognized, or even basically fixed already. * It's not entirely Lifetime. Their copyright enforcement here comes from BBTV_AETN. And the link I just gave appears very incorrect in saying that they do a poor job at finding their copyrighted material. At least with dances, they find their copyrighted material within hours (if not minutes); but they just make a claim on getting the monetized advertising revenue, instead of trying to get channels the copyright strikes that would lead to deleted YouTube channels and videos. ** The last explanation I was given from someone in contact with Lifetime was it was okay to upload dances in the way they were broadcast on television - they'd just make sure they get the ad revenues from the YouTube views with a claim. But they would get more seriously upset if users uploaded bonus footage that was hosted on Lifetime's own channel. And they would be okay with uploading '''some' footage of the dialogue portions of the show, if they arbitrarily felt the total duration of the clips didn't constitute a significant portion of the program.'' — WhereIsMyMind (talk) 04:52, March 14, 2015 (UTC) Dance Tables Since we have Dance Tables, maybe we need to put Pre-Dance Moms Dances in it? I think it's better when all dances in one place. Waiting for your answer. Lovely Anya (talk) 17:11, March 14, 2015 (UTC) I'm indifferent, so do whatever you think is best. (It'd probably be best to put them below the dances for the show, however.) WhereIsMyMind (talk) 17:17, March 14, 2015 (UTC) Season 1 Episode 9: Acapella I was rewatching Season 1 and noticed that in Episode 9, Maddie was in her Acapella costume. Did she perform it at Thunderstruck? User:MermaidMelodyFanForever (talk) 12:51, April 6, 2015 (UTC) ---- I'm about 95% confident that was from Dance Educators of America Nationals in Las Vegas, on the same day. (Melissa has said they were running back and forth from three nationals in Vegas, and described it as crazy.) http://dancesnaps.zenfolio.com/p337015256/h3b612e9c#h3b612e9c WhereIsMyMind (talk) 13:12, April 6, 2015 (UTC) ---- Hi dear WhereIsMyMind. I was just wondering why you cancelled some of the changes I did on Mackenzie Ziegler's page, in the friends section. She actually is friend with them, they are part of her other crew, the Mini Elite Competition Team (they can be seen together on "Cotton-Eyed Joe and Borrowed Angekls). I am sorry I if bothered you, I just want to understand. Thank you very much, Meilee ;Response: :Because there's undesirable stuff that comes with being "famous," and probably especially with this particular show. So I'm uncomfortable dragging people deeper into this, when I'm unsure if they (and their parents) have decided that for themselves (and I feel more that way about the younger dancers.) Plus, because I kind of want to limit the Dance Moms Wiki to things related to people actually on the show, or working on it. :I think I was being overcautious here, since the cat's out of the bag on them being "Instagram famous" (Brooke K. has almost as many followers as Asia), and there probably can't be harm in simply listing their names. So you can put them back in the list as plain text, provided they at least were in Mackenzie's first music video (which means they were kind-of on the show, and indicates they and their parents were kind-of okay with being on Dance Moms, to a limited degree.) :— WhereIsMyMind (talk) 13:02, April 14, 2015 (UTC) Thank you for the time you took to answer my question. I will not add the names back, now that you shared your point, I kind of agree with it and I understand totally. You are right, even though they are "famous", I guess they do not want their private life all around the medias. Thank you again, Meilee Community App! Did you know that approximately half of the visits across Wikia are coming from mobile devices? To support that mobile traffic, Wikia is creating iOS and Android apps that focus exclusively on individual communities. We are happy to inform you that the Dance Mom's community has been selected to receive a dedicated community app. This means that you will have an app exclusively for your community that you, the admins, can curate! Please see this help page that will explain how manage your content in your community app, and also ways to promote your Community App on your own community. Here is a link to the where you can curate. I've already gotten it going, feel free to edit as you see fit! If you have any questions about the Community App itself, how to manage content on it, or how to promote it, please write in to Special:Contact. Thanks for being an exceptional community! Good luck with the app! Jamie (profile)•(talk) 23:41, May 19, 2015 (UTC) Request I have requested to adopt this wiki but i needed to ask you if i could the Wikia Staff told me to ask you so could i adopt the wiki please I have requested to adopt this wiki but i needed to ask you if i could the Wikia Staff told me to ask you so could i adopt the wiki please Violetlover1234 (talk)Violetlover1234 :You had 3 edits on this Wiki before asking that question. No way am I going to say that you should be able to adopt this Wiki. – WhereIsMyMind (talk) 21:42, June 3, 2015 (UTC) How many edits do i need to reach to adopt the wiki Violetlover1234 (talk)Violetlover1234 :I don't know if I'd want anyone to adopt the Wiki. But I'd support Lovely Anya now if anyone. (I'd make her an admin now, if I had bureaucrat status.) You'd have to have a significant fraction of her number of edits, as a first condition for me to change my mind. – WhereIsMyMind (talk) 12:35, June 5, 2015 (UTC) i don't care anymore so forget it i ain't bothering13:29, June 5, 2015 (UTC)Violetlover1234 (talk) CADC or BDA in Solo Battle: Round 1 In GMCLA video (around 0:30) written "Сandy Apples", that's why I changed dance table in the episode page. Sorry if I'm wrong. Lovely Anya (talk) 16:50, July 20, 2015 (UTC) ---- I think they start the week still as CADC. But they're wearing Jeanette's gray jackets (with pink "BDA" writing) at the competition. And in previews at the end of the last episode, Jeanette says, "I am not Candy Apples, I am BDA." So there's been a switch at some point. WhereIsMyMind (talk) 16:59, July 20, 2015 (UTC) ---- OK. That make sense. Lovely Anya (talk) 17:15, July 20, 2015 (UTC) Hi dear WhereIsMyMind I noticed that when we search for the dance "Dance in the Rain", we aren't redirected to the page of the song "Never Goodbye (Always C U Later)". I tried to fix that problem, but I didn't figure out how to do it so I was wondering if you could help fixing it. Thank you, Meilee Berry (talk) 22:31, July 27, 2015 (UTC)Meilee :A search-redirect should exist now. :There are probably a number of other dances where there's no redirect page from the dance name to the song name, because that hasn't been done systematically over the course of this Wiki's history. :— WhereIsMyMind (talk) 22:55, July 27, 2015 (UTC) ---- Ok, thanks a lot! Meilee Berry (talk) 14:15, July 28, 2015 (UTC)Meilee Hello WhereIsMyMind, I noticed that for some reason the Youtube Templates have stopped working specifically when you edit a song page and publish it. It seems to revert the code back to code instead of the box. I don't know if this is something to do with the coding or something specific to this wiki. Just curious because once the page is publish it cannot be reverted back without losing the changes made. Thank you! :) Wreckitcel (talk) 03:27, August 11, 2015 (UTC) :Wikia is having "technical difficulties." They will fix their various significant problems when they are able. :Until then, I've replaced the templates' coding to instead output hyperlinks to videos (rather than try to output embedded videos.) :— WhereIsMyMind (talk) 15:49, August 11, 2015 (UTC) New Portable Infoboxes We’re reaching out to a few of our top communities, hoping to get you on board with the migration to the new . And we have tools to help! ‘’’Why we’re doing this’’' Simply put: Most current infobox structure translates very poorly to mobile experiences, and indeed any device that doesn’t use desktop-style displays. On desktops and laptops, they often look amazing. The problem is that Wikia’s traffic is trending mobile. There is an important graph from our forum post about infoboxes a couple weeks back, and I want to share it here as well: Mobile is the future. Not just for Wikia, but for the web as a whole. Take a look at the recent trends and future growth predictions for mobile traffic - it's staggering. We partnered with the Wikia community to create this new markup to make sure that your hard work can be displayed on mobile devices (as well as any future technologies) easily and without any new coding conventions. It’ll take some effort up front, to be sure, but we’re here to help, and the work you put in now will pay for itself tenfold in the future. ‘’’Tools we’ve designed to ease the process’’’ We’ve enabled two new features on your community. One is a tool for migrating the “old” infobox code to the new markup. It identifies templates on your wikia that look like infobox templates and places a box on the right rail of the template page. When you click the “Generate draft markup” button in this box, it opens a new tab containing a draft of your infobox using the new markup. The second is a new feature on that will highlight which infoboxes on your wikia have not been migrated to the new infobox markup. It’s fairly intuitive - you can click on the infobox title link itself to see the old markup, or simply click the “Convert!” button on the right, which performs the same action as the “Generate draft markup” button. . I’ll help get things rolling by converting a template or two as an example if you’d like me to, and please leave me a message if you have any questions. -- Wendy (talk) 03:35, August 20, 2015 (UTC) Template:DMWepisodeNav in episode page Can you delete DMWepisodeNav template from this page? It's not very useful and takes a lot of space. Lovely Anya (talk) 07:05, August 26, 2015 (UTC) The tag :Summary: The tag doesn't work on the Dance Moms app, where you're getting your greatest rise in site traffic. Although changing to the normal video upload process will mean that you lose the ability to see-without-playing when videos are taken down by Lifetime, more of your videos will be available to a greater percentage of your audience if you consistently upload your videos normally. Hey again :) Thanks to your detailed response to my question back in March, I well understand how important your -tagged method of displaying videos is. As someone who helps manage w:c:tardis, one of the most video-heavy wikis at Wikia, I completely sympathise with your efforts to make sure that videos which have been pulled down from YouTube are also removed here. That said, MediaWiki, the core software that powers this and every wikia, dates back to the turn of the century — when Al Gore had just "invented" the internet and portable phones were as big as a brick. Back then, everyone worked on screens that were the basic shape of televisions, and so you could reasonably assume that if you made your wiki page look a certain way on your own computer, that's how it would look on everyone else's. That is certainly not the case today. We at Wikia are finding that some of the code that's been largely unaltered since the last decade — like — isn't sufficient to today's increasingly mobile environment. The tag is simply not flexible enough to know what size screen it's being displayed on, meaning that it can look very ugly if surrounded by elements that are able to flow well on a, say, 320px iPhone 4s screen. In fact, because you define the precise width and height of a video through some of your templates, you're actually changing the aspect ratio of videos, even on the desktop. And that's only if the -tagged video shows up at all. Which brings me to an interesting point about Dance Moms. The growth of traffic on this wiki is coming from a somewhat surprising place. Your main increase is not coming from the desktop or even our standard mobile skin. Rather, it's coming from the Android app we created for this wiki. And on the app, the -tagged videos ''do not work. Because so few wikis still use , we're extremely unlikely to devote any resources to making compatible with the Dance Moms app. And, in fact, it's hard for us to make the case that we ''should, since your community isn't consistently using these tags. You have over 600 videos that have been uploaded in what Wikia considers the "normal" method, via the "add a video" button at . Thus, it's pretty easy for our Engineering department to make the case that you guys in fact do use the normal upload process, and that the use of tags is only a secondary case. And unfortunately, there's no way to build in the ability to detect when a video has been removed from YouTube into our "normal" video code. Given all this, I think you face a fundamental question. ::'Is it better: :::'to be able to quickly identify videos that have been pulled down by Lifetime ::'or :::'to make sure that the videos can be played by your wiki's total audience? As a fellow admin who's crazy about videos — and not as a staff member — I can tell you that I would pick reach over maintenance every day of the week. To me, that's simply how the math works. Let's say you have 700 videos via , and of those, 100 were pulled by Lifetime. Sure, you've lost that 100 on desktop — but you've lost all 700 in the Dance Moms app. I can't personally construct an argument in which that math works out. Obviously, normally uploading your currently--tagged videos is going to be some work. But there are ways to relieve some of the burden. And at the end of the day, you'll be reaching a broader audience. I know there's a lot to consider here, so please feel free to reach out to me on my user talk page with any questions and concerns you might have. — CzechOut 16:39, August 28, 2015 (UTC) Portable Infoboxes Again Hello! I'm just dropping back through to see if you read my earlier message. It's been a bit and I haven't heard back, and we have some developments, so I figured I'd check back. First (and most obviously if you read the staff blog) we've released tools for identifying and converting old-style infoboxes into portable infoboxes. It's quite simple - you can access the tool itself on the Template page of any "unconverted" infobox, or visit and take a look there. To help, we wrote two detailed help pages: and . You can also see some examples of the new boxes on wikias such as Grand Theft Auto or take a look at a particularly beautiful and complex template designed by a staff member at Battlefield Wiki. You are welcome and encouraged to contact me if you have questions. You can also contact User:Ducksoup, he'll either have an answer for you or find someone who does. Content portability is important to Wikia's future, so we'll do everything we can to help. -- Wendy (talk) 04:46, August 29, 2015 (UTC)